GNOME Foundation Board of Directors elections 2023

Community Elections and Referendums
1

The GNOME Foundation Membership and Elections Committee are pleased to announce the upcoming elections for the Board of Directors in Spring 2023.

The most important deadlines (UTC) in the timeline are the following:

             *GNOME Board Elections 2023*
        2023-06-14: Announcements and list of candidates opens.
        2023-06-21: Last day to announce candidacies, submit summary statements.
        2023-06-22: Final list of candidates.
        2023-06-22: Instructions mailed to eligible voters, voting begins.
        2023-07-06: Voting closes.
        2023-07-06: Preliminary results are announced.
        2023-07-20: Last day to challenge preliminary results.

ELECTIONS

Three (3) of the seven members of our current Board of Directors have been ruling GNOME for 24 months now. We, the GNOME Foundation Members, will have to elect what will be the Board of Directors for the next year.

Why are elections going to renew three (3) out of seven seats this year? Please read below under the VOTING session.

The seats that will be up for election during this run are:

  • Philip Chimento
  • MartĂ­n Abente Lahye
  • Thibault Martin

Directors that will remain part of the Board and their corporate affiliation can be found at Ongoing directors: corporate affiliations.

CANDIDACY

To announce your candidacy, create a new post within the Elections and Referendums Discourse category with your full name, e-mail, corporate affiliation (if any), and a description of your reasons for wanting to serve as a director.

Candidacies must be announced prior to 2023-06-21, 23:59 UTC.

Members are invited to ask questions to one or all candidates via Discourse at:

These candidates might become your representative, so do not hesitate to ask them questions.

Please try to avoid asking duplicate questions that others have
already asked. Also, bear in mind that the candidates invest a lot of
time answering questions, so please be reasonable with the amount and scope of the questions.

A list of candidates will be announced on 2023-06-22.

ELECTORATE

Every GNOME Foundation member whose membership is valid as of
2023-06-21 is eligible to vote in the elections. Please note that
Emeritus members won’t have voting rights. More details about what
Emeritus members can and can’t do are available at

MembershipCommittee/EmeritusMembers - GNOME Wiki!.

If you are not a member yet, please consider applying for membership
as soon as possible at:

Late applications will most likely not be processed in time.

The GNOME Foundation Membership and Elections Committee do inform members they need to renew by mailing them once a month both on their personal email and on the foundation-list mailing list. We recommend that members also double check this to avoid a missed opportunity to vote. Please verify that the email address that is associated with your GNOME Foundation membership is valid and that you are able to read emails sent to this address. With the introduction of https://account.gnome.org verifying this information is now possible by just logging in with your GNOME Account. Your password can be reset via:

https://password.gnome.org

A new password will be e-mailed directly to the registered e-mail for your account.

You can verify your membership status by visiting Membership – The GNOME Foundation and
looking for your name, surname on the list of members.

VOTING

The Electorate will receive complete instructions on how to vote by
2023-06-22 via email.

This specific election run will elect only three (3) directors (instead of the former 7), as a result of the amendments that were recently introduced to the Foundation’s Bylaws. The aforementioned changes introduced the ability to only renew a subset of the available seats of the Board. The rationale of the changes and the historical information about these specific amendments can be found here:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2019-July/msg00007.html

The candidates voted for most as counted by a single transferable vote system will be elected, except that no more than two individuals affiliated with any one corporation may be sitting on the Board as Directors during the same term. This holds true even in the case a subset of seats is up for renewal: as an example if X is affiliated with the Example Inc. and his/her seat is not up for renewal, the amount of possible candidates affiliated with Example Inc. that may be elected would be 1 (one). On top of that and as taken from the Foundation’s Bylaws: “8.2.4: In the event that any election of directors results in a single entity representing greater than 40% of the Board, than the nominee representing that entity receiving the least number of votes, shall be replaced by the nominee receiving the greatest number of votes who was not elected to the Board.” For a full definition of corporate affiliation, see the GNOME Foundation charter at:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/Charter

In the event of a tie for the final slot on the board, the Elections
Committee will schedule run-off elections as soon as possible.

More information about The GNOME Foundation Membership Committee and the voting process can be found here:

MembershipCommittee - GNOME Wiki!
https://vote.gnome.org

4 Likes
2

A reminder to the electorate: please be aware of point 4. of the election rules, specifically:

Any person is eligible to be elected to the Board of Directors if they have the support of the required number of voting Members. Members nominations must be seconded by one (1) other member, and non-Members must be seconded by 5% (up to a maximum of 5) members. To announce your candidacy, create a new post within the Elections and Referendums Discourse category with your full name, e-mail, corporate affiliation (if any), and a description of your reasons for wanting to serve as a director. To second a nomination, send a reply to the above candidacy message directly on Discourse with your full name and e-mail used for your Foundation membership. Members standing in an election are not eligible to second other candidates. Candidacies must be announced with the requisite seconds received prior to 2023-06-21, 23:59 UTC.

For non Foundation members which are running as candidates please make sure to second a nomination by directly commenting on the relevant candidacy thread in Discourse.

3

:+1: As well as candidates who are foundation members who also need at least 1 second as well.

4

That doesn’t sound right. If we are electing three new members, that means three of the seven members of our current Board of Directors have been ruling GNOME for 24 months now (and four of them have been for 12 months, so their term will end next year).

May I ask how many members we currently have? I understand we haven’t reached the deadline for more people to become members and be able to vote, but current membership already gives us a baseline so we may know what the absolute minimum required “secondments” is.
Do I understand correctly that if we have more than 100 members (which I expect to be the case), then whatever the actual number is, the requirement will be for 5 “secondments”?
(If a native speaker could teach me the correct word, I’d be grateful. I have a strong feeling “secondment” is not it.)

For the purpose of the election, knowing the number of seats is necessary, but who exits the board is actually not that useful. The information we require and which is missing is who remains:

We also need them to state their current affiliation.

And once more: this really should be part of the standard process and I shouldn’t have to ask for it for the fourth year in a row. :expressionless:

1 Like
5

I was also a bit confused by the 5% requirement, given that it is likely to never be reached. By my count of the posted membership, we sit at 232 members which amounts to 11 or 12. For comparison, a referendum requires the support of a hard 10% of the Foundation membership.

Probably “endorsements” would sound most correct, although “secondments” is apparently a valid word. English has a fair amount of undefined behaviour, and games of Scrabble have been known to end friendships.

6

Thanks Alexandre, I’ve updated my post to mention 24 months and a pointer to Robert’s post in Discourse with the list of Directors which will remain part of the Board and their affiiliation. Regarding the amount of members we currently have 235 members, that surpasses the requirement of the 5% of the membership and as such (as per Bylaws, section 8.3.2) we only require a total of 5 endorsements from existing Foundation members with the general rule of candidates not being able to vouch for other condidates as it was correctly stated in one of the comments.

1 Like